A new campaign from Dove promises the opportunity to rid your Facebook of "feel-bad ads" but it doesn't deliver.
Every day the average American is bombarded with thousands of advertisements. These messages, ranging from the barely perceptible to the very intrusive, subtly shape our tastes, our ideas, and, of course, our spending habits. That, of course, is the idea.*
These messages are pushed at us, and we subsume them into our world view. In this process we have varying degrees of control over the messages we see. We can fast-forward the commercials on our DVRs and we can install ad-blockers on our browsers, but any way you cut it, we're taking in countless images and slogans from ad campaigns every single day. What if that were to change? What if we had more control over what the advertisements we see look like?
That power is the premise of a new advertising campaign from Dove, on offer now to Facebook users in Australia and Brazil. Perhaps of all the different industries that shape society with their ads, none is as reviled as the beauty industry for its promotion of an unrealistic physical ideal for both men and women. Dove, which has a history of ad campaigns featuring women of many shapes and sizes, explains, "In fact, Dove discovered that only four percent of women believe that they're beautiful. ... We decided to do something about it. Dove created the Ad Makeover, a Facebook application that lets you replace those feel-bad ads with messages designed to make women feel good instead." The video below ostensibly demonstrates how this works.